This disclosure relates generally to targeted advertising and more particularly to targeted advertising in personalized digital media.
Traditionally, advertisers have attempted to tailor advertisements based on expected demographics of users. Even before the advent of broadcast media, a business advertising a product sought to purchase advertising space for that product in a publication read by typical consumers of the product. As publishing and broadcasting costs fell, more media catered to niche audiences, allowing advertisers to more finely tune advertisements to narrower groups of media consumers. Nonetheless, advertisements mainly cater to the typical consumer of media in which the advertisements are presented, causing atypical consumers of media to encounter irrelevant advertisements. With the advent of personalized digital media, advertisements may be matched to an individual user according to known traits of the user. Producers of personalized digital media often have limited information about a user, so a producer may miss an opportunity for presenting a user with an advertisement relevant to the user because the producer lacks explicit user information indicating that the user is in the advertisement's target audience.